Richard A. Cloward; Sociologist Fought for Welfare, Voter Rights

Richard A. Cloward, a Columbia University sociologist and advocate for the poor who stirred the welfare rights movement and was a force behind the 1993 Motor Voter Act that encouraged mass voter registration, died Sunday in New York of lung cancer. He was 74.

Cloward was both activist and theorist whose most influential work was a 1971 book, “Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare.” Written with his wife and frequent collaborator, political scientist Frances Fox Piven, it is considered a definitive study of welfare policies in the United States.

“Regulating the Poor” was a radical analysis that argued that governments shrink or swell public relief programs as a means of social and labor market control.

Cloward and Piven believed that making the welfare system work better for poor people meant that the people should take charge. When they learned that many people who qualified for welfare were not receiving aid, they founded the National Welfare Rights Organization in 1966 to encourage the poor to join the welfare rolls. They outlined their views in a controversial article published in the Nation magazine that year.

Their efforts gave rise to a more militant welfare rights movement that believed in occupying welfare offices and other acts of civil disobedience.

Some critics have said that by encouraging the expansion of welfare rolls, Cloward and Piven contributed to the backlash against the welfare system and the popularity of later “workfare” programs.

Cloward rejected such arguments and continued his sharp criticism of the new policies, particularly workfare.

“This whole workfare emphasis that began in the late 1960s and expanded into the 1970s and 1980s is really a hoax,” he said in 1994. “Welfare recipients are really the scapegoat, and all of the emphasis in welfare is drawing attention away from the economic malaise.”

In the 1980s, Cloward began to focus on the problem of low voter turnout in the U.S. In 1988, he and Piven wrote “Why People Don’t Vote: And Why Politicians Want It That Way,” which recounted the history of efforts to streamline the nation’s electoral processes.

It argued that the U.S. was the only Western democracy whose government did not actively encourage and automatically register its citizens to vote. The book found that literacy tests and other voter registration requirements since the beginning of the 20th century have discouraged participation and concluded that political parties have a vested interest in such barriers.

“Politicians don’t want new voters,” Cloward told The Times in 1988. “They just want the ones who elected them.”

Cloward favored so-called motor voter programs, which allow people to register to vote in motor vehicle offices and at other government agencies, including libraries and welfare offices. In 1982, he co-founded and directed Human SERVE, a national voter registration reform group that played a leading role in winning congressional approval of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, commonly known as the Motor Voter Act.

Born in Rochester, N.Y., Cloward earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Rochester in 1949. He received a master’s in social work in 1950 and a doctorate in sociology in 1958 from Columbia. He was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Assn. of Social Workers in 1999.

He is survived by his wife, a daughter, two sons and four grandchildren.